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As a DIY PPC’er or first timer it’s difficult to know how much to spend on PPC (Google Ads or Bing Ads). It probably an even harder decision to know how much to spend on a Pay Per Click company.

What you have to appreciate though is, a ppc agency are not a cost to your business if you are already doing AdWords, they’re going to save you money!

At myWebhero, we plug all the holes in your PPC campaign so that your budget is as effective as possible. Any good & reputable PPC company will do the same, but there are some questions you should ask of them.

Are you a Google Partner?

Do you have certified PPC professionals?

Do you hold the Google specialisation for my campaign?

What references can you provide?

How do you focus on providing Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

Get in touch with myWebhero to optimise your pay per click campaign. We don’t talk in jargon & provide clear transparent reporting so you know where every penny of your campaign is being spent, including your PPC management fees.

Need help? If you’re not sure how to get the best from your ad campaign and are becoming overwhelmed by it, fear not, we’re here to help. As a trusted Google Partner we’re experienced in helping people like you get their campaign performing at peak levels.

Get in touch if you need any advice or are looking for a professional company to help with your AdWords. Why not give us a shout, we don’t bite and you’ll find us fast & affordable!

I love data – I love the unfolding stories they contain, but a warning for the untrained, caution is needed when drawing conclusions from data.

I have a background in Econometrics and Data Analysis having completed an MSc a few years back. Now, that really opened my eyes to everyday assumptions that people make when dealing with data. Data is biased – pretty much always, & our assumptions are not much better. We don’t have the required understanding to deal with data correctly.

One of the most common misunderstandings is around endogeneity, essentially, biased data.

Here’s a great example of biased data leading to dubious conclusions – inspired by “How Not To Be Wrong” by Jordan Ellenberg – a great read if you’re into a bit of maths!

Bullet Holes

During the Second World War US Bomber Command were looking at ways to protect their aeroplanes. You don’t want your planes to get shot down, so you put armour on them. But you don’t want so much armour that they become unwieldy and sitting ducks to marauding German Messerschmitts.

So you optimise the placement of the armour.

Bomber Command enlisted some mathematicians to help solve the optimisation problem, presenting them with the data below.

Section of Plan

Bullet holes per square foot

Engine

1.11

Fuselage

1.73

Fuel System

1.55

Rest of plane

1.80

Where would you place the armour?

Take a minute to look at the data and decide where you should place the armour.

Bomber Command saw the solution was to create efficiency by only placing armour where it was needed most – i.e. the parts being hit the most.

This is a fatal assumption – literally!

The actual solution is to put the armour where the bullet holes aren’t.

Missing holes

Why put the armour there?

The distribution of bullet holes should be a fairly random distribution and spread evenly over the plane. But this is not borne out by the data. We see far fewer holes in the Engine section.

So where are the missing holes?

The missing holes are on the planes that are not being included in our sample. Those planes never made it back to base because they were too badly damaged. And that is why you put the armour on the engine section.

Conclusion

You need to be careful when working with data that you understand its limitations. If you have biased data because of a biased sample, if you misinterpret causality or if you fail to include factors that influence outcomes; then you can make poor decisions which you believe are based on fact.

Here’s a quick one for you to think about:

Does having a video on your website help improve your Google ranking? A lot of people claim it does.

Indeed, when looked at in aggregate, pages with videos do rank higher. But those videos are being shared and by such actions, creating links back to the website – a known major influence on Google rankings

I’ll leave you with that one!

Finally, if you want to improve your statistical knowledge, “How Not To Be Wrong” is an eye-opening and entertaining read. And it also details how a bunch of MIT students cracked the lottery!

Each generation likes to communicate differently. Baby-boomers love the phone, Gen X, like myself are compulsive emailers, but the younger Millenials have grown up with text & instant messaging and expect to be able to communicate using their preferred channel.

To make it easy for people to get in touch with your business, whatever their generational label, Google have introduced the “message extension”. This is simply a little button that appears on your ad that allows people to message you a question.

As you can see, it’s very similar to the “call extension” that proves popular with users looking for a quick answer and to skip the whole website navigational challenge. It essentially removes an obstacle to contact.

What’s so great about text message extensions?

Remove barriers and reduce steps to contact

Increase contacts from people who prefer to text rather than call

Increase contacts from younger audiences

Get contacts from audiences looking for immediate solutions

What should you consider before introducing Text Message Extensions?

Do you have the resources to respond immediately?

Text messaging is very instantaneous. People will expect a prompt reply, so if you won’t be able to answer straight away, text messaging might not be for you.

Do I want to be interrupted by messaging at all hours?

This AdWords extension, does let you create a custom schedule, so you don’t have to be woken at 3am with that SMS bleeping, but what about during the working day? Will you be able to cope with the interruption and demands of the text message? While text messaging, on the surface, seems like a quick communication method, I’m sure you’ve have those ping-pong like messaging rallies that seem to go on forever and wonder why you didn’t just pick up the phone and call in the first place!

How do I get AdWords Text Message Extensions?

To enable Google AdWords text message extensions, you simply need to have a phone capable of sending / receiving text messages. Set up the extension in the usual way as you would for a call extension, but you get to choose the text for the extension e.g. “Send us a text”.

Naturally, the text extension will only show on devices capable of sending texts!

I’ve lost count of the people who’ve told me that “AdWords do not work“. Actually, I translate this as “I can’t make my AdWords work“. I offer to take a look at their account and pretty much always see the same basic mistakes. It’s not that these people are stupid, they are not, they run their own businesses – successfully.

I mean, I could have a go at dentistry, but I suspect the results would be painful!

So why have go at running a pay per click campaign yourself?

Anyway, if you are determined to run an AdWords campaign yourself, here are 5 things you need to adjust today!

Stop letting Google bid for you

Start tracking conversions

Create multiple AdGroups

Add negative keywords – and plenty of them

Stop using Broad Match

Stop Letting Google Bid For You

Set your account to manual cpc – this allows you to adjust the bid on individual keywords. You can bid higher on low ranking or high converting keywords.

Start Tracking Conversions

How can you adjust your campaign if you do not know what works. Start tracking conversions so you can see what keywords, ads and landing pages are actually driving sales & leads. You can then eliminate under-performing keywords and boost the budget behind the ones that sell!

Create Multiple AdGroups

This is a really common problem with have-a-go PPC accounts. One AdGroup – One Ad – 100 Keywords.

Theme your keywords to your ads in “AdGroups”. This means that the ad directly relates to the search.

For example you may be selling shoes. Create AdGroups for:

Men’s Shoes

Sport Shoes

Leather Shoes

Children’s Shoes

And so on. Now write an ad for each AdGroup – hint – they will all be different from each other.

The power of this approach is two-fold.

First – the ad suddenly is a lot more relevant to the person searching. If you searched for “Kids Shoes” which headline would you most likely to click on:

We Sell All Types Of Shoes or Children’s Shoe Sale Today

Second, the higher the relevance the better the Quality Score – basically, the better the quality score the less you pay per click.

Add Negative Keywords

Add negative keywords to stop your ads from showing in costly and irrelevant searches. Use the negative keyword “jobs” to stop people from seeing your ad when they search “shoe shop jobs”. This tip can save you a LOT of money!

Stop Using Broad Match

Change your keyword match types away from Broad to Phrase or Exact, this will also help you stop appearing in irrelevant searches.

Implement these 5 tips to stop wasting money and improve the number of sales you get through your AdWords campaign.

If your website conversion rate is lagging a little, try these simple tips to super-power your website. As a website optimisation specialist, I’ve tried & tested these hacks on multiple sites to great effect.

And if you want to quantify the value of the changes you make, be sure to run them as an AB test!

Declutter

Keep it simple, stupid.

Ever been to a jumble sale? Well, I’ve seen them on the web! It’s surprising how many web pages are a confused mess of messages, service & products. Customer cannot see the thing they are there to buy – customers leave – no conversion.

Strip out all elements on the page that are unnecessary and detract from the message you are trying to convey.

Include

lots

of

white

space.

Break up text with:

bullet points,

headings

and images.

Remember, people don’t read websites – they look at them.

Sell The Benefits

I’ve performed quite a few conversion optimisations where I’ve had to rewrite the page to eliminate the jargon & tell the customer what’s-in-it-for-them.

It’s a classic mistake that passionate business owners make.

Look at your copy, then give it to a lay-person to try and decipher & rewrite in terms of the benefits the customer will get from using your product or service.

Stuck for ideas, here’re some examples.

Customer Reviews

One of the first things I do when optimising a website is to try and gain the customers trust. There are many ways to do this, but the most dramatic is to simply include customer reviews.

Many people are sceptical about the impact of review, but I’ve seen 30%+ increase in conversion rates when adding them to conversion pages.

Here’s some stats (source Reevoo)

50 or more reviews per product can mean a 4.6% increase in conversion rates.

63% of customers are more likely to make a purchase from a site which has user reviews.

Site visitors who interact with both reviews and customer questions and answers are 105% more likely to purchase while visiting, and spend 11% more than visitors who don’t

Consumer reviews are significantly more trusted (nearly 12 times more) than descriptions that come from manufacturers.

CTA

Finally, we come to the Call To Action. Now that your visitor arrived at your site in milliseconds, has seen a nice clean page so that they can absorb your message that sells the benefits rather than the features and you’ve gained their trust by allowing them to read your customer reviews – it’s time to close the deal.

Make sure you tell your customers what the next step is.

Buy Now

Call Today

Sign Up

Add To Basket

It’s amazing the difference a CTA makes! And talking of which, why don’t you read more about conversion optimisation with myWebhero HERE

Super Power Your Google Analytics Reporting For More Conversions

Everyone’s got one, some are bigger and more impressive than others. But who looks theirs daily? A good hard stare. Yes, I’m talking about the overlooked & unloved Google Analytics Account. Let’s see if we can improve your website & Google Analytics Reporting.

By God, analytics is boring & I should know having an MSc in Data Analysis, yawn. And it’s also complicated. So, for these reasons people pay no attention to their Google Analytics reporting, even though the answers to Website Conversions great mysteries lie within.

So here’s five simple tips you can implement today to get more out of your analytics, understand your website & customers better and hopefully improve your online sales performance.

Create A Dashboard

The first tip is straight forward. Make a dashboard. Nobody knows how to navigate the Google Analytics Reoporting Interface. You can never find what you need – if that is you know what you need! So create a dashboard that shows you the key information you need on one page. Use the built in charts to present the data visually, the human brain is great at recognising patterns, so you’ll pick up much more that way.

Making dashboards can be complicated – more so if you don’t know what information you should be looking at. But let me introduce you to the Google Analytics Solutions Gallery. Here you can just download pre-built dashboard straight to your account, no messing. Awesome!

Enable Auto-Emails

So once you’ve got the reports you need, it’s still a pain logging in to the account and viewing them – and there’s always something better to be doing. So wouldn’t it be great if you could just have them delivered to your inbox every week, day or month? Well, surprise, surprise, you can. Just select your report & click email at the top of the screen.

Filter the Traffic

You will probably see you are getting lots of traffic, but take a closer look & you will see it’s coming from exotic place… and Russia. Guess what, it’s spam, not real. You’re going to want to filter that out so that your account is a true reflection of your website performance.

Set Up Goals

If you haven’t got goals set up on Google Analytics, you are not alone, but you really need to action this one. After all, if you are not tracking what’s important on your website, why bother?

Example of goals could be:

Making a purchase (ecommerce)

Clicking on a phone-number or email address

Downloading a brochure

Completing a contact form

Visiting a certain key page

Once you have goal tracking in place you will start to understand what channels are effective at converting visitors to customers – then you can stop doing all that Social Media! It will help you measure the impact of any changes you make to your website or online marketing. Really, this is the single most important change you can make to improving your online performance and Google Analytics Reporting.

I hope you find these tips useful. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment or get in touch.

How I improved “Add to Cart” by 80%

Many ecommerce shop owners will be familiar with the challenge of improving conversions rates and are also probably overwhelmed with the whole process of optimisation. As an ecommerce owner & also a conversion optimisation specialist who works with other ecommerce shop owners, I understand the pain. It can be incredibly difficult to budge conversion rates, especially with ecommerce, but it can be done, and the rewards can be enormous. Let’s take a look at how I managed to improve “Add to Basket” by 80%.

The sales process is a funnel:

Get people to look at a product

Get them to add it to the shopping cart or basket

Get them to go to checkout

Get them to pay

myAB Test

Here I concentrated on getting people to add product to the basket as I had plent of visitors and the drop out rate was low once they had a product in the basket.

The important thing to do is to not make wild changes to the website in the hope that your dart magically hits the bullseye, but to actually test them out simultaneously – throw lots of darts – one will hit it!

Ok, well it does need a bit more thought than that, but the principle holds. Anyway, here’s what I did.

What is an AB test?

Skip this bit if you are familiar with AB testing, but those that are not here’s what they are:

I make variations of the original web page and run them live on the website simultaneously. Visitors to the website will see one variation or the other. I can then measure which page variation leads to the most sales.

Note: it’s called AB testing, but really it should be called ABCDE….. as you can test as many variations at the same time as you can dream up!

My AB Experiment

I was convinced that Paypal hinders conversions – but a lot of sales do come through Paypal, so was cautious about meddling. My test was to remove the Paypal logo and button from one of my product pages. (Note – I tested just one product incase of calamity) In addition to this experimental page, I tried one where I added a second “Add to cart” button and another where I changed the visibility of the button by making it bright green instead of grey (the old classic AB test!). So my test looked like this:

Original page with Paypal

Page without Paypal

Page without Paypal but with a second “Add to Cart”

Page without Paypal but with a green “Add to Cart”

And So To The AB Test Results

The results show that the 2 Cart Button variant achieved a 79.5% improvement in Add To Cart over the original page.

The page with just the Paypal Button removed saw a 61% increase in Add To Carts.

Only once during the experiment did a visitor click the Paypal button.

Changing the cart button colour reduced clicks on it.

Engagement (time on page and other interactions) with the page was higher in all variants.

So there you have it. Some actionable data. I removed the Paypal button from the site and added a second Cart button to all products – now I’m watching my conversion rate soar and enjoying the money!

See What Conversion Rates You Can Achieve With An AB Test – For Free!

Ever wanted to try something new out on your website? Now’s your chance.